Toshimichi Mori said just before BBCSEX dropped that he would love to make an anime of the game, and let's face it, between the visual novel-like story mode in the games and the sidestory told in manga and light-novel form it was only a matter of time.

Now this news has popped up.

Arc System Works’s 2D fighting game series BlazBlue is being adapted into an anime series, the wraparound cover jacket band for the second volume in Fumishobo’s light novel adaptation of the fighting game franchise has revealed.

The news comes in from Netizens in Japan who have secured a copy of the BlazBlue light novel series’s second volume, which hits book stores today.

Time to speculate on voice actors, studios, and of course if this is actually happening.

This will ether be great or a great mess.

It could be pretty awesome, Lets hope that it will not be a terrible disaster.

please make a batshit insane guilty gear anime. please.

but yeah this sounds like it could be cool too

Yeah....VG Anime have rarely gone well let alone the ones based on fighting games. Is there an emo character in the roster? I fully expect a 3 minute exposition before the final fight backed by poorly made dubstep about how he is carrying a great dark burden but doesn't want to fight but the bad guy is so evil AND MUST ANYWAY!! YRWAAAH!

@extomar: Have you played BlazBlue at all? Sure Jin might be a dick and Litchi still has the hots for an amorphous blob but everyone is varying degrees of insane and they don't hide it in brooding monologues.

Maybe now I'll be able to understand what the fuck's going on.

@dochaus: Oh sure but that doesn't mean I remember any of the details or care or could make sense of the story (random guess: the story is nonsense) nor does it really matter what is in the game where more often than otherwise they ignore it to do what the director(s) feel looks cool and that usually means a monologue and yelling. :)

This could be cool. I've always found the snippets I've caught of the Blaz story to be pretty interesting, but fighting against AI has always seemed really pointless to me versus playing against actual people, so I've never really dug in to the BB story modes.

@extomar: Seems a little unfair to be this hateful of a franchise you've even admitted you know nothing about. The BB story is hardly high quality literature, but it's still decent fun.

Also, finally! I'm sure they'll just follow the games storyline, but it'd be great to see some of the novels in animated form, since they're never going to be translated. Or even some of the Teach me Miss Litchi, Help me Professor Kokone or the gag ending sections at the end of each episode.

As for voice actors I can't seem them going for anyone else other than the originals. Interest would really drop if they didn't get those guys back.

And yet still no Great Lakes Avengers cartoon.

This is going to make things more confusing than it already is...

@petiew: I never said I didn't know anything about but that it was forgettable and in the end doesn't matter because like many other Anime shows based on fighting game franchise the producer doesn't care because the source material is weird.

My pet theory on this is that it is just a reflection of how goofy and loopy and very very very short fighting games "plots" tend to be where the creative staff is left with trying to piece together something coherent that can be scripted and animated for a lot of episodes. The end result is often something so inferior that one would be better off just playing the game again instead of watching the show.

This could be surprising and be interesting but I won't hold my breath.

And then we're getting a BlazBlue JRPG right? It's pulling a backwards Persona 4?

Persona 4 > P4 Animation > P4 Arena

Blazblue RPG < BlazBlue Animation < BlazBlue fighting game

I'm leaning on the latter. As much as I think BlazBlue is alright, I can't see an anime for it being well received, for some reason.

I'd love to be proven wrong, though!

@extomar: Blazblue's story and fiction is a bit different to the likes of Street fighter and other fighting games though. There's actually a lot of content and the story mode follows all of the characters actions individually through one canon thread. The story of Calamity Trigger could comfortably be told in a 12/13 episode series, since there's a lot of source material to work from. There's also a second game, a fanservice manga, additional scenarios and multiple novels to pull material from if they're speeding through too fast. The lack of material to animate wont be a problem here. It's different to a game where non-canon arcade endings and one line of dialogue at the end of a fight is all you have to work from.

Like I said before, the actual quality of the source material is subjective. It's hardly amazing literature, but I think there are enough interesting characters and plot threads for this to turn out alright. It's not going to be an amazing anime, but I think it could turn out to be decent.